AD Price Housing Project

The Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority has retained Arbour Construction Management as their agent on the multiphase AD Price Housing Project. The current phase of the project is valued at over $8.5 million and is spread over several blocks of Jefferson Ave. which is a key secondary artery within the City of Buffalo, New York.

The project consists of an interesting mix of fifty five townhouse and duplex units which are interspersed in an urban environment. Cast in place concrete foundations support conventional framed lumber walls which in turn support engineered lumber floor and roof framing members.

Major exterior building components include asphalt shingles, multicolored base and accent vinyl siding types, and street facing building elevation brick veneer. All units have individual forced air heating and air conditioning systems as well as individual metering of water, natural gas, electric, phone and cable TV utilities.

Reuse of inner city sites, especially ones like those of this project whose use dates back to the 1800’s, is always a challenge. The challenge comes from both working in and around the heavily trafficked streets and from the concealed and oftentimes undocumented nature of subsurface abandoned water, sewer and phone lines, foundations, rubble filled former basements, and underground storage tanks.

In all cases the subsurface deficiencies must be fully addressed. Hazardous or otherwise inadequate subsurface materials must be removed and properly disposed of. Voids left by same must be filled in a controlled manner using engineered fill in conformance with project specifications prior to allowing any subsequent new construction to proceed.

The project is being completed using a phased occupancy plan. As of the date of this writing twelve of the project’s fifty five units have been turned over to the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority (BMHA) which has executed several resident leases at those completed locations and the first sets of many end users are now in their new homes.

Integral with this phase of the new construction is a sizable multiple building separate prime asbestos abatement and demolition contract subset which will allow for future phases of the new construction work to continue.
Demolition contractors have always been pioneers in recycling, basing their bid not only on the manpower and equipment required to affect the work but deducting from same an estimated salvage value for scrap aluminum, steel, copper and other materials known to be constituent parts of the project mass.

Much of the demolition on this project was less than fifty feet high, all of it less than than one hundred feet in height. The demolition methodology was addressed in a very straight forward manner. Track mounted hydraulic equipment was used extensively to claw at the buildings from end to end and from the top down all the while crawling on top of the rubble mass created via the heavy equipment’s inward march on top of the building footprints. Prosecuting the work in this manner places the structure on the ground where it is most easily and safely handled.